You wake up as Arthur Dent and your first task is to turn the light on, pick up your famous gown and look at the contents of the pocket. As such, he packs even more detail into the story and, this time, that famous dressing gown is mentioned from the word go (it was absent from Douglas's work until the third book). This was not just the first Hitchhiker's book reshaped into a text adventure either, this was Douglas re-visiting and re-writing his iconic book. It was a text adventure game, and while not the first of its kind, it was certainly the first to be written by a best-selling author. "You become one of the characters, in fact, in this particular game you become several of the characters, so you've got to be careful how you treat them, or you might find it coming back on you," he told Fred Harris with a grin. "This is actually turning a book into a game," Douglas proudly announced on Micro Live. He proudly typed Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency on his own Mac II - this early incarnation of modern word processing allowed for a much more precise edit, as he created arguably his most intricate masterpiece.īut, back in the early eighties when he should have been working on his fourth Hitchhiker book, he instead worked on the concept of turning The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy into a game. He had an obsession with computers he was the first person in the UK to own an Apple Macintosh computer ( Stephen Fry was the second). That would have been a fairly easy thing to achieve, and would surely have been popular you can certainly imagine a shooter in which things turned into whales, or you got 42 points for taking out a bowl of petunias, but that was not what Douglas was out to do.Īdams was convinced that video games were the next big thing. They might have thought that Douglas Adams had simply signed the rights away for a standard Space Invaders style shooter to have a few H2G2 references crowbarred in. On the surface, many would have written this move off as a cheap cash in. Super Mario Bros had only just been released, and prior to this injection of quality into the video game market by Nintendo, any games that tied in with films or a TV series were looked upon grimly, thanks to the infamous ET game scandal of 1982 (the game's reputation of being largely unplayable resulted in an estimated 700,000 unsold/returned copies being buried in a New Mexico desert - several thousand of the fly-tipped games were excavated in 2014, most still in their original boxes).Īnd aside from a series of adverts Morecambe & Wise starred in for Atari (the games console the notorious ET game was created for), there was very little in the video game world for comedy fans.įor a bestselling author, the decision to move into the world of video games would probably have appeared to have been a little odd back then. It was still early days for the video game industry. It was March 1985 when Douglas Adams arrived on the set of Micro Live (a TV programme developed in conjunction with the BBC's Computer Literacy Project) to tell Fred Harris about his latest innovation - a computer game version of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. But the question on many people's lips may be how did this interesting collaboration between two best friends, Douglas Adams and Terry Jones, come about in the first place? To find the answer you have to go back to the start, namely the start of Douglas Adams's fascination with technology and particularly video games. The intriguing and altogether bizarre story of The Starship Titanic began life not as many people may have believed as a book written by Douglas Adams, or even a book written by Terry Jones, but as a computer game.Īppropriately, the latest Radio 4 special ( broadcast Sunday 19th December) set in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy expanded universe stars Michael Palin as the Encyclopaedia Galactica, and Simon Jones (Arthur Dent himself) has a cameo.
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